The Seaside Years

Err...hello?

Is this thing on?

This is The Disappearing Man, a blog about one fat bloke's efforts not to die quite as soon as he's currently scheduled to do, through the application of sheer bloody-minded stubborn-bastardy.

This blog's been in existence now for about seven or eight years. When it started, I was living in London, and was 20 stone 7.25 lbs, or 287.25 lbs for my American friends, or...oh hold on, talk among yourselves, I haven't quite got enough fingers for this bit...just over 130 kg, the web informs me.

That was heavy. My doctor had decided it was heavy enough to recommend me for bariatric surgery. And that was a genuine option for me. I faced a long dark tea-time of the stubborn bastard, and decided I couldn't personally go for the surgery until I'd tried my own implacable determination against the training I'd had in being a fat bastard and killing myself, mouthful by mouthful.

I did it for a little over a year, and lost six stone, or 84 lbs, or 38 kg. Along the way there was much fun, much ranting and sweating and hatred of the human race, and a progression from being the bloke who struggled to put on his own socks to a marathon-walking, spin-classing, gym-understanding bloke who confidently swore he'd never go back to the way he was before.

The thing is...my brain, as I'm coming to realise more and more as the years go by, works a little differently to many people's. Intellectually, I'm all about doubt and grey areas and live and let live - I'm among the hippiest of hippies in many ways. But in terms of my own existence, I seem to live a binary, inflexible life - one thing or the other.

The way I got to be over 20 stone was by allowing myself total, childlike freedom. If I wanted something, I had it, and devil take the consequences. I was at one and the same time entirely content with this approach and deeply self-loathing - I was Schodinger's Fat Fuck.

The way I Disappeared the first time was to radically and rapidly change the nature of my behaviour - to switch from total liberty to almost-total self-denial. I made a decision, and instantly, overnight, cut out fried foods, chocolate, desserts, fizzy drinks and overt sugar, while changing my approach to portion size, protein and even the dreaded salad vegetables (which I maintain to this day are more or less nature's garnish and should not be taken at all seriously as a food group). I began walking - first short distances, then longer, and longer. I invested in an exercise bike heavy enough to take my ass (not as easy a thing as you might think to find), and I began to pedal that ass viciously off, plugging in my iPod to keep me up to pace and avoid the running stream of obscenities in my brain. I started drinking water for the first time in my life, replacing all my seductive fizzies with clear boredomjuice.

And the way that worked was what I think of as my 'perspex boxes.' I have to live in a world where other people are able to eat and drink what they like, and not want to pound their skulls in - I'm married to a foodie with a baking fetish and mad skills, it simply can't be an option to ban all the good things in life from my world. That means I erected these 'perspex boxes' all around me. I was in the box, and all the tempting, delicious stuff was outside - visible but unreachable as far as my brain was concerned.

As I say, it's not for everyone, but it worked for me. During the course of that year I moved, with d, my wife, from London back to my childhood home,  the Welsh Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil. And it was there that, one night, d asked me whether I could, after that successful year, experiment with re-introducing treat-foods into my diet. It began with a battered cod and chips.

And the boxes were broken. The digital, black-and-white world in which I live couldn't sustain just one treat, in the way an alcoholic's world can't really sustain just one drink.

Over the next handful of years, I tried time and time again to resurrect my boxes, and failed. And the weight came back as more and more I ate and drank precisely what I wanted. Precisely what I wanted, of course, wass mostly carb, and fried things, and sugar, and chocolate. Because Dopamine, right?

We don't live in Merthyr any more. In the last two months, we've finally achieved a long-held dream and moved to the Welsh coast, to the Anti-London that is Saundersfoot. The last year has been insanely stressful for us both, as we've been trying to sell our Merthyr flat, while both being made redundant.

This week, the flat finally sold. Money transferred. Debts were paid off.
The new chapter of our lives, this seaside chapter that hopefully sees us through to the end, began this week. And I'd made a pledge that after a year of extra-special stress-eating (something to which I've never knowingly been prone before - I always copped to eating for the sake of gluttony, or just because I wanted the tasty stuff), when the flat sold, and the stress lifted, I would get the hell back to my Disappearing.

The blog's part of the process, it seems - that sensation of reporting to someone on the ups, the downs, the issues of Fat Fuckery and Stubborn Gittishness, and which will win in a clash of those titans. It's like having an electronic Father Confessor, an audience, a bunch of eyes I have to meet if I go wrong. So here we are again, preparing to erect the perspex boxes. Preparing to bike, and walk, and ignore the fact that I now live in one of the many HOMES of battered cod and chips, with tea shops, cake shops and chip shops everywhere I look.

The rule is that I AIM to lose the medically-safe amount each week - 2lb. There'll be regular weekly weigh-ins on a Tuesday morning (slightly hampered at launch by the fact that a great deal of our stuff is still in Merthyr - including my scales), by which progress and setbacks will both be recorded. Suffice it to say that I firmly believe I'm now heavier than I was when I began my first Disappearance, but the official launch weight will be whatever the scales first records when it gets here. That means the goal will be to lose 104 lbs in the first year - 2lbs per week, on average, over 52 weeks.

That's goal 1: Lose nearly 7.5 stone in 52 weeks. I have no expectation of actually achieving that of course, but having the goal is useful as an aspirational stick with which to beat myself. If and when I DO achieve the 7.5 stone loss marker, I'll still have around 2.5 stone to go to be at my medically advised weight, being a shortarse at just 5ft 6. But one goal at a time, eh?

As is the way with most people about to embark on a diet, we've just more or less finished all the 'bad' food in the house. While writing this, I ate the last slice of d's homemade Thanksgiving apple pie, and a chunk of Christmas pudding. It's in me now, and it's done. This part of my life is done.

Perspex boxes - up.

Come along for the ride if you like. Welcome to The Disappearing Man: The Seaside Years.

The Slackass Variant

So - yesterday, woke up at 18st 6.

This morning, woke up a chunk heavier than that, having not been back in a bathroom since the night before last, and having had what were technically four meals during the course of yesterday. Was I worried about that?

Nah. It'll sort itself out over ther course of the week.

Today has been mostly desk-bound, but went to do a different walk this evening, because I had to pick up my medication prescription in the town centre. Ended up walking a fairly paltry 7,500 steps. That feels like a slackass day, given my recent history, but honestly, my brain feels like...

Y'know the opening of Wall-E, where he gathers up all the trash and turns it into compacted cubes? That's what my brain feels like - day-job, company, Disappearing, everything else, crunching my damn brain into cubes, day by day.

Fuck it, if this has to be a slackass day, that's what it has to be. I honestly don't particularly feel like I'm coping right now with the plate-spinning - if this one has to slow its spin down to keep some other things on track, so be it.

The Lifestyle Constipation Question

Lalalalalalala - not talking about the Orange Idiot, not thinking about the Orange Idiot: it's his day, he can have it, it doesn't mean he gets to colonise my world. Today at least, this will be a Trump-free zone, because let's face it, nowhere else is going to be, ever again, unless we choose not to let him in. We have our own chunks of electronic real estate, and he can only go there if we let him. So, Hail to the Thief, and let's move on.

The worrying thing is that in Disappearing terms, very little actually happened today. But then, the rhythm is developing that very little happens any day - I work, I eat fairly sparingly, I go out and walk my daily 10,000 steps+ in the dark, what adverts for weird living yoghurt call my 'digestive transit' has slowed right the hell down, I have my main meal later than would probably be advised, mostly because I don't go walking till I finish the day-job at 5 and the walk is currently taking me over two hours, and actually, in my faintly obsessive weighing, not a whole hell of a lot is happening to my numbers. But what is happening is not particularly good - though whether that's due to the whole slow transit thing is a fairly disgusting question on which to spend too much time, so let's not.

Right now, the Disappearing seems indicative of a more general pattern in my life - so much to do, so little actually seeming to get done - three edits to do, a day-job with its own challenges, reviewing work for a geek site, writing two audio adventures, trying to sell a flat, trying to deal with all the stuff we packed up when we moved OUT of the flat, Disappearing and actively thinking about taking on new challenges, like Booktubing - oh yes, I'm thinking of moving into Youtube and doing a Jefferson Franklin Booktube channel (ask someone young - I had to). I have a kind of lifestyle constipation right now that needs a kind of motivational enema - it's all doing what I need it to do to some extent, but every day my To Do List, not to mention my To Give A Crap About List, seems to be getting longer and more unbeatable.

Sigh - is there a lifestyle guru in the house? Or, come to that, a handful of To-Do List laxatives?
Still, on the positive side, I'm not, at the moment, this time round, letting the Disappearing fall by the wayside simply because there's too much other stuff to do.

Of course, the counter-argument to that is that perhaps - just perhaps - that's a big contributing factor to there still being so much else to do, but I can't afford to think like that at the moment. This is the first phase of KBO this time round - "Keep Buggering On," as the phrase has it. And as the options are digital, with KBO leading to success and SBTIA or "Say Balls To It All" leading to failure and backsliding, O we jolly well have to KB.

Positive thoughts, positive thoughts, positive thoughts - still a stone lighter than I was when we began this journey again just before Christmas. Just need to dedicate the crap out of some time to the job. Anyone know where I can get some?

The Birthday Flake

It was d’s birthday today. I’d planned to take her to breakfast in Cardiff. I’d booked us an escape room – one of those Chrystal Maze-style puzzle rooms – with our friends Kelly and Mark. I’d booked us a dim sum lunch at a Chinese place that neither of us had ever been to before, but about which d had heard good things. And I’d booked us a room in one of our favourite Cardiff hotels. Y’know, cos of the whole mini-mini-break vibe of it being a birthday.

Ohhhh the master plannery. Every guy probably thinks he’s been really devious, but d fed my delusions of big bad evil genius by claiming she had no idea about the escape room until Mark and Kelly suddenly joined us in my usual Starbucks, just two minutes away from the room.  Score one for ego.

The escape rooms were, as I say, just a couple of minutes away from Starbucks, but they were, thanks to a broken-down lift, up three flights of stairs.

‘Hi. Do you…have a booking?’ said the guy we met at the top of the stairs.

‘Yep,’ I said. ‘1.30. name of Tony.’

‘Errrrm…are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Which room are you booked into?’

‘The Heist,’ I told him. ‘Gonna get our Ocean’s Eleven on, be all criminal mastermindy. Here,’ I said thrusting out my phone for him to check the email they’d sent me confirming the booking.

‘Yyyyeah, that’s not us,’ he explained. ‘That’s totally the other escape rooms that are nothing to do with us. They’re up by Cardiff Castle.’

‘Fuck,’ I muttered. ‘Right…’

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that I had my laptop bag, d had her enormous shoulder bag, and we’d also just picked up a bag of birthday presents from Mark and Kelly, including a bone china cakestand. Also, the Januaryness, so we were in many, many layers, including scarves and hats.

I mentioned the three flights, right?

Down we went, hiking up the damned road.

Now here I absolve myself slightly – the guy at the first escape room had said the one we wanted was up by the castle, and by Burger King. Mark said he’d Googled it the night before, and he knew where it was. Sure enough, there it was – not exactly by the Castle or the Burger King, but it was definitely the right place: it even had ‘The Heist’ written on the door as one of the rooms you could play.

Fuck. More stairs. Three more flights. Seriously, escape room people, would it kill you to have some ground floor games, for wheelchair users more than fat fucks?

Anyway, we got up to the third floor again, and in the reception there were some hipster dudes with Edwardian beards, who seemed bound and determined to ignore us. But there were lockers for all our crap, so we didn’t have to take them into the room with us. We dutifully hung up coats, sweaters, hats, scarves, and jammed bags into lockers. Then we announced ourselves to them as having a 1.30 appointment. ‘The Heist,’ I said. ‘Name of Tony.’

‘We have nothing booked under that name,’ Edward VII flatly informed me. I shoved my phone forward to him. ‘It’s on the door,’ I begged. ‘This must be the right place.’

‘Nah, that’s our newest place,’ he explained. ‘Up by the Castle and Burger King.’

‘We are up by the Castle and Burger King,’ I muttered. ‘Seriously, a year ago, there wasn’t one of these places, now Cardiff has at least three escape room facilities on pretty much the same street?’

We sighed. We pulled bags out of lockers, grabbed hats and coat and scarves and sweaters off hooks, went down three flights and hiked up the street. Again. In the meantime, escape room three had called me to find out where the hell we were.

‘We’re minutes away,’ I told them. ‘Oh wait, here’s your door. We’ll be up in a minute.’

Three more flights.

‘Fuck it, it’s my birthday,’ said Donna, grabbing the new and working lift. In an effort to be a conscientious Disappearer, I took the stairs. Bad move. Once we got to the third floor reception, it turned out the actual room was up…another flight of stairs.’

I’d like to tell you we used up all our mental initiative just finding the place. Let’s just say, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, frankly, we’re all doomed. We had more help from our guide than was really fair, and extra time, and we still had quite some way to go to get out of room three of three. Me personally, I’d never have got out of Room One. I had one moment of success, but the rest was baffling to the point of what-the-hellishness. Basically, I held a flashlight – again, come the zombie apocalypse, go ahead and melt my fat ass down for candles.

Then there was lunch. Having schlepped through more of Cardiff than we’d ever intended, we were…at least notionally…closer to where Kelly and Mark had parked their car, than we were to the restaurant. We walked to the car, down a subway which Kelly was sure was the way. Mark insisted it wasn’t. He was right. We did later come to the subway Kelly’d thought it was, in fairness, and on we went. Mark drove us to the restaurant. There was nowhere to park, so we drove back to the train station, parked up and got a cab back to the restaurant.

‘You don’t need a cab to get there,’ argued the cabbie.

‘Trust me,’ said d, ‘by this stage in the day, we do.’ We did.

The restaurant had closed its main kitchen and was only serving sim sum.

There followed something of a dumplingfest. Meat dumplings, vegetable dumplings, rice rolls, an occasional char siu bun. I stopped earlier than I normally would, because, y’know, Disappearing and all that. d got to try a hot jelly for the first time, so that was… an experience. Then we walked back from the restaurant back to the station (so as to not risk the wrath of another cabbie!), then over to the mall to pick up some Krispy Kremes for Kelly, Mark and d. And finally, to our hotel. While d exchanged bottles of fizzy water for still and red wine for rose, I went out for one last walk – to grab a Starbucks and pick up some more water.

Result? Nearly 11,000 steps. So much for a relaxing birthday!

Disappearingwise? Sure, 11,000 steps is good enough for me, and it’s not like I’ve overindulged especially – yes, there were dumplings, but there was no breakfast, and the dumplings were all I ate today, so I’m happy enough with it.

Back to work tomorrow, and a day into which I will have to artificially force some exercise.

And while it’s not exactly been a relaxing or pampering day by any stretch of the imagination, hopefully, it’s been an unusual, funny, typically ‘Tony’ day for my girl.

I have a Plan for next year.

Already.

Be afraid. Be very afraid…

The Piecrust Pledge

Bleurgh.

That is pretty much all.

Been walking quite a few days this week, but have still yet to get on a bike. Am about to break that non-habit in the faintly desperate hope of achieving something even vaguely in the same postcode as progress at tomorrow's weigh-in. Not sure, but it feels distinctly unlikely - feel flabby and lumpy and altogether like the whole thing's in failure mode again. Humph.
Hence the bike on-getting. Really speaking, the bike on-getting should be a feature of every day, but deadlines and whatnot simply haven't let it be as important as it should be.

How about this. Whatever the result tomorrow, the next seven days will see me walk at least four times, and bike an hour every day. There you go - that's my piecrust pledge for the day.

Mmmm....piiiiiecrussst...

Then whatever else happens, it retrains the body into expecting a regular chunk of exercise in the day.

Good. That's that sorted then. Will now jump on the bike feeling vindicated and as though I have both some earthly clue what I'm doing, and a dedicated plan for its achievement, rather than just feeling like a lumpy old fuck.

(Shrugs) Hey, sometimes you've got to lie to yourself, just to shift your point of view.